Category Archives: Hospitals

Just stumbled upon this via a friend on Facebook, and watching the welcome video just sent chills down my spine. Two passionate filmmakers are creating an interactive, continuously-updated online TV channel focusing on nothing but birth, and the state of birth in our world right now, by interviewing the world’s leading experts in birth and […]

Back in 2007, I was lucky enough to attend an advance screening of The Business of Being Born in New York City, and I wrote this review of it at the time. Since then, it’s become widely popular and widely viewed, loudly praised and criticized by opposing sides of the birth debate, and has served as […]

There is an astounding collection of writing going up on The Unnecesarean regarding the growing rift between obstetricians and the out-of-hospital birth community. All of this is in response to the The Obstetrician’s Lament, written by OB-GYN Anette Fineberg, MD, which came out in the May edition of ACOG’s Green Journal (Obstetrics and Gynecology). I […]

One of the advantages to being a midwife is being on all kinds of funky mailing lists, which means that all softs of health information, conference invitations, and sometimes even free samples often show up on my doorstep. A few days ago, I got just such a mailing– the NIH Consensus Development Conference Statement on […]

So one of the advantages of working as a midwife in a hospital is that I get to participate in many births that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to experience in private practice. If I were working as a private practice midwife, and as a homebirth midwife in particular, there is no way I would […]

Haven’t updated in awhile. I blame the craziness of my job. Seriously. And I feel like very few people actually understand how bad it can get, unless you too are a hospital midwife on your feet 12 hours a day, triaging, admitting, delivering and then doing it all over again, and again, and again. This […]

…just to illustrate the bind that the homebirth midwives find themselves in at the moment after the closing of St. Vincents hospital and the subsequent loss of their back-up hospital/ written practice agreements (see yesterday’s post): Last night I was working (at the HHC public hospital in Brooklyn where I spend a good deal of […]

St. Vincents hospital was the most homebirth-midwife friendly hospital in Manhattan, and quite possibly in New York City, period. It was certainly the only hospital in Manhattan which accommodated homebirth and homebirth midwives. My own midwife delivered her patients there, and she would often comment to me about what a lovely set-up they had at […]

Last night was a very strange night. It wasn’t that busy, and yet, somehow, neither the other midwife nor myself were able to take a break. The pace was very steady. We kept expecting it to settle down, but it never did. Just as we were thinking “oh, as soon as this woman is discharged, […]

Sometimes, briefly, you feel like you’re making progress, that midwifery outreach is making a difference, that people are becoming more educated and informed, and then you read an article like this one, over at Time Magazine, and you realize that you exist in a small bubble where your philosophy on birth is far different than […]